February 08, 2013

Return Of The Friday Follies

Yeah, But He Read It Twice
A book entitled "Fire of Francis Xavier" was returned to the Fort Washington branch of the New York Public Library on Monday. It was 55 years overdue.

Trading Dollars For Pennies
Coca-Cola
received 910,000 votes for their online Super Bowl promotion. Sounds
like a great success until you calculate the cost -- 107,000,000 other
people had to sit through a pointless :30 seconds of stupidity. If they
put half as much time into making a good spot as they did into the online gimmick, they would have gotten 10 times the value.

More Bad News For The Nutrition Nazis
"Replacing animal fats with vegetable oils, a mainstay of modern health
advice, may lead to an increased risk of death among people with heart
disease," says the San Francisco Chronicle. In an analysis of 458 Australian men with heart disease, funded by the National Institutes of Health, it was found that those who replaced saturated fats with polyunsaturated vegetable oil had a 60% higher death rate from cardiac disease than those who didn't get any "dietary advice."

Holy Cow! Flying Machines!
Can you believe this nonsense?

Give War A Chance
In 2004, professional basketball player Ron Artest went into the stands and got in a fight with fans. He was given the longest suspension in NBA history for an on-court incident. In 2006, he was suspended for Game 2 of the Sacramento Kings' playoff series against the San Antonio Spurs for throwing an elbow to the head of Manu Ginobili. In April of 2012, he elbowed Oklahoma City's James Harden in the head, causing a concussion. He was suspended for 7 games. Last week he was suspended for one game for punching the Detroit Piston's Brandon Knight in the face.

In 2011 he changed his name from Ron Artest to Metta World Peace. You can't make this shit up.

Deep Thinking In Brandland
And speaking about Coke, their former chief creative officer, now head of brand and brand marketing at AT&T has this
profound piece of wisdom for us: "It's not just about customers, it's
about people."

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Ad Contrarian Says:

"Shakespeare was a storyteller. You're a copywriter.""Good ads appeal to us as consumers. Great ads appeal to us as humans."

"Social Media: Tens of millions of disagreeable people looking to make trouble."

"As an ad medium, the web is a much better yellow pages and a much worse television."

"Sometimes success in the advertising business requires sitting quietly and letting clients proceed with their hysterical delusions."

"Marketers prefer precise answers that are wrong to imprecise answers that are right."

"Brand studies last for months, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and generally have less impact on business than cleaning the drapes."

"The idea that the same consumer who was frantically clicking her TV remote to escape from advertising was going to merrily click her mouse to interact with it is going to go down as one of the great advertising delusions of all time."

"Nobody really knows what "creativity" is. Every year thousands of people take a pilgrimage to find out. This involves flying to Cannes, snorting cocaine, and having sex with smokers."

"Marketers habitually overestimate the attraction of new things and underestimate the power of traditional consumer behavior."

"We don’t get them to try our product by convincing them to love our brand. We get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product."

"In American business, there is nothing stupider than the previous generation of management."

"If the message is right, who cares what screen people see it on? If the message is wrong, what difference does it make?"

"The only form of product information on the planet less trustworthy than advertising is the shrill ravings of web maniacs."

"There's no bigger sucker than a gullible marketer convinced he's missing a trend."

"All ad campaigns are branding campaigns. Whether you intend it to be a branding campaign is irrelevant. It will create an impression of your brand regardless of your intent."

"Nobody ever got famous predicting that things would stay pretty much the same."